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Roadmap for Firefox 4

According to the roadmap for the open source browser, the Mozilla developers plan to launch the next major Firefox release in October or November 2010. Around the same time, Mozilla plans to release version 2 of its Fennec smartphone browser. The organisation plans two further updates to the current three-series before the new release, Firefox 3.6 within the next few months, and version 3.7 in the first half of 2010.

Firefox 3.6 will concentrate on a number of speed and responsiveness issues, with improvements to the location bar and TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. To improve application stability, Firefox 3.7 plans to isolate plug-ins to their own process. In Firefox 4, the plan is then to extend that isolation to each tab to ensure that the browser doesn't crash because of a single dubious website. This "process isolation" is a feature of the Google Chrome and Chromium browsers, introduced a year ago.

Firefox 4 will be designed to respond to "multi-touch" finger movements and will allow bookmarks and browser settings to be synchronised using Weave. It will also integrate JetPack, a Mozilla Labs development for more easily developed extensions, and will have a new user interface on all platforms.